What is the scariest book you've ever read?

I need a title. someone recommended a really scary book here a few months back and I can't remember what is was.

Night Shift...it's a collection of Stephen King short stories and there was one in there -- I can't remember the title -- that had to do with rats (there might've been a couple in there about rats, now that I think about it). Just so happened that while I was reading about these rats or whatever thumping and making noises in the walls, my downstairs neighbor was vacuuming. We had central vacuuming so when she vacuumed, it made a lot of racket.

Inside the walls.

Incidentally, this woman was vacuuming at 2 a.m., give or take.

:scared:

He agreed.

that if he's going to have a BIRD in one of his books, he needs to do a little research.

Virtually every bird mentioned has a *problem.*

also has a *problem*

He's my favorite writer.

my pet pig at my big old farmhouse anytime he wants.

But his sentimental expressions of youth and connections from the past...Heart-stopping. I read it first at age 13 and for the 7th time at age 32. I means a lot to me as a story, but also as an author and professional sentimentarian. The scary parts are cool too, but his memories of childhood are so vivid and poignant. It is nothing like my own childhood, but it is so human you can smell it.

Hope you can tell him someday...thanks. g.

I think he'll know what I mean.

I liked The Mangler. And The Boogeyman.

Ooh, and Grey Matter. :D

The 2 stories I still have nightmares over from that book were "The Mangler" and one about the boogeyman.

Stephen King's best book by far.

with the noises in the walls. Before he made it novel-length. It was still called Jerusalem's Lot in that book.

Salem's lot was a modern-day small-town vampire story, while Jerusalem's Lot is a pure Lovecraft pastiche.

nightmarish.

Big mistake!

:scared:

:scared:

and there was a thunderstorm going outside... right at the end of one chapter, the main character was approaching the house where he suspected the vampires were located.

The last line of the chapter was something like, "and he felt a hand upon his shoulder."

Boom, right at that instant, the power went out in the house and I was left in pitch black.

Normally, books don't scare me, but that time I was a bit shaken.

When I was young, I used to listen to the CBS Radio Mystery theater, a radio drama that somehow endured until about 1981. One night, they had a particularly creepy episode. I shut off the lights, and started, hesitantly, to drift off to sleep.

That ended when one of our cats landed on my chest with a thump and a "chrrrrp". I jumped about 7 feet in the air, and poor Patches was propelled about 20 feet, out the bedroom door and down the hall!

That one scared the crap out of me.

story behind "The Exorcist" a while back. That scared the piss out of me.

I thought it was way scarier than the movie.

scared the shit out of me


so did

Insomnia

little known SK book

so many of his kept me up at night

oh

a movie


CUJO

Happy Thanksgiving friend :hug:



lost

:scared:

was "IT"

In fact, that book could cure insomnia if read in bed.

That whole notion of being isolated in a place just outside of real time, but able to see its remnants, was incredibly disturbing.

Everybody was gone for the weekend and i made the mistake of reading it when i was all by myself. Not the best King book but it scared me silly.

That cat creeped me out for months.

We'd had an ancient orange Tom cat that had disappeared several months previously. I fell asleep reading Pet Sematary, and when I woke up, the cat had returned and was curled up next to me.

Damned near sent me into premature labor, and I still don't think that kid is 100% right.

He probably was never very far away either. :rofl:

when I read, and my little dog used to sleep under the covers, .... you know how when light hits a dog's eyes a certain way they glow all green.

Well middle of the night reading Pet Semetary (why is it spelled with an S) looked under the covers, saw my dogs eyes glowing... I shot out of bed, ran to my mom's room jumped in bed with her crying that my dog was possessed.

Man she yelled at me (that's what I get for reading she said)

Honestly the creepiest book I've ever read.

Once i realized that Alex was only 14.

It's been so long since I've read horror, though my dad loved it and I grew up on Shelley, Bierce, Poe, Stoker, Blackwood, but I never really enjoyed much modern horror lit. Stephen King's "The Stand" made a huge impression at the time, the time being thirty years ago, so it's an impression that lasted. The other book which inspired nightmares (and a shitty movie) was Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles," which touched on all basic human fears of novelty, alienation, utter solitude and the lonely death. I can't forget still how that series of stories made me feel. One of my daughter's 20-yr old friends who is basically a fixture in this house, recently started to read Bradbury and he is enthralled. In this day and age! That's what makes it classic, I guess, and wonderful.

I haven't read him in so long, he probably strikes me like a Carolyn Keene mystery novel now. But at the time!

switch went off and I saw the world totally differently.

Now that's art.

Good Gawd that is one Hell of a scary story.

is a masterpiece. There's no real "horror" in the sense of King, Lovecraft, Robert McCammon or Dan Simmons, but the sense of total dread that suffuses the whole book is enough to scare the hair off a gorilla. There's always something incredibly horrific lurking just out of sight.

Of course, I read it when I was like 12.

just inside the area between the hallway wall and the doorway into the living room (that we almost never used)

I had seen the commercials with the pigs eyes back when the movie came out

I don't think I moved until about 3:30 AM

I was probably college age though. I was by the fireplace at my parents' home reading, all quiet, turning the pages and working through the second half of it one night, and someone had quietly walked into the room without my noticing. They made a sound and I literally threw the book out of my hands.

Clowns still freak me out.

I mean YEARS later, I was driving home from work and crossed the bridge over the highway. It was one of those bridges that rise to the middle, then fall, meaning you can't see what's on the other side until you're in the middle of it.

The first thing I saw was the tip of a huge balloon, then, quickly a bunch of them. They were attached to a string, and the string was in the hands of a gigantic clown. My heart quickened, and I nearly froze and slammed the breaks.

At some point between going to work at 6am and going home around 5pm, a new McDonalds had set up for its grand opening.

Frickin' nightmares, that book gave me.

I would have been scared to death!

The last half, with the gratuitous kiddie sex, not so much. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness is a close second; with no character development at all, its cold, clinical descriptions are absolutely chilling.

I'll give a partial nod to the introduction to Martin's A Game of Thrones and the first few chapters of Strieber's Communion.

I know it makes people uncomfortable, but it is not difficult to understand.

I barely noticed it on the first read-thru. I mean, I noticed it of course, but it wasn't pornographic and was clearly the kind of extreme thing that needed to happen to make that bond, something that the standard "blood oath" didn't quite capture.

I am not sure what I would think if I had read it for the first time as an adult. My first time was age 13 and over the years has become sentimental and memorable in a lot of ways. Like a song you aren't sure you would like if you hadn't dated a person who listened to it over and over.

... with this book.

Sorry for the late reply, but I was gone for several days and wanted to address this anyway because it struck so close to home.

I read pretty much constantly and usually have more than one book going at a time (1 for lunchtime, 1 for home, 1 for traveling, etc.), but there are two books (and only two books) I read regularly. I read _Lord of the Rings_ and _It_ at least once a year.

I read IT for the first time when I was 18, and oddly enough it was the first Stephen King I'd ever read. I don't like horror as a genre generally. The cover at the time intrigued me for some reason (monster claw coming up out of a sewer grate), so I started reading it in the bookstore, and before I knew it, I'd finished the first chapter. I was hooked, so I bought it, then spent the next four days devouring it, reading most of it in between classes at college in this old, old, old library building that had more floors than it looked like it should from the outside, hidden nooks and crannies, stairs that basically went nowhere. Odd building.

Anyway ... it got me so in part because the kids in the group reminded me so much of my "circle" as I was growing up, and the battles they fought were so much like the monsters we fought. A lot of horror writers seem just to be trying to telling a scary or, more often, gross story, but their monsters come off as too literal, even if they don't mean it that way. King is a master of allowing the reader to identify with battling a werewolf that looks like a mummy that looks like a clown that looks like your ... dad. There's the Everyman concept in fiction. King has created the Everymonster concept.

Beverly is one of my friends, and she fought that same fight, just as Bill is also one of my friends, and he suffered in much the same way until he escaped. And I know Mike Hanlon too ... very well ... just sitting there, keeping watch.

I'm giving myself chills just thinking about it.

Skeleton Crew, a collection of short stories.

http://www.stephenking.com/library/story_collection/skeleton_crew.html

:hi:

That book actually freaked me out. :scared:

"...As Navidson investigates this phenomenon, he finds that the internal measurements of the house are somehow larger than external measurements. Initially there is less than an inch of difference, but as time passes the interior of the house is found to be seemingly expanding, while maintaining the same exterior proportions. A third change asserts itself..."



It scared the shit out of me. I got really involved in it. It doesn't hurt that I'm a reference junkie & got a charge out of the design of the book. The story (within the story) was scary as hell.

:loveya: :yourock: :pals:

:spray:

On edit: Damn. I just investigated it. It's *true*.

Glad you mentioned that one. It's moving up to next on my list. :)

It will help you to have a fattish cat to cuddle with if you read it late at night.



One who seems "concerned" & "protective".:D

I should be so lucky. Mine's just lazy. :P

When I first noticed it in bookstores, I thought it looked horribly gimmicky, but enough people who knew my tastes told me I'd like it, and they were right.

I found it more tragic and sad than actually scary (I love scary books and movies, but unfortunately, don't actually get scared by them very easily), but there were definitely some memorably chilling passages, like the one where Truant directs you to imagine something horrible just out of eyesight.

The Lovecraftian colonial expedition was good and spooky too. "Fthairs!

Oddly, this was the xkcd comic on the day I finished the book, some 8 years after it was first published:

http://xkcd.com/472/

That book is amazing.

I loved it!

Closely followed by Teh Haunting of Hill House.

Isn't that the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan story?

:hide:

I read the book before I saw the movie and right after I saw William Peter Blatty on the Tonight Show. I had also just bought my first Black Sabbath album (the one with the song Black sabbath on it) Very creepy!

not a little kid..I was married.
I refused to see the movie.

it at age 12 ...The Bell Witch is a poltergeist that supposedly haunted the Bell family in north central Tennessee around the time of early statehood. Andrew Jackson was acquainted with this family.


I was also scared witless by 'The Haunting of Hill House' which I read in my aunt's old Victorian farmhouse, up stairs, by myself, late at night, with the wind blowing, and of course lots of big old trees all around to rattle against the roof and stuff.

I love that book.

:scared:

The Bell Witch story is scary as hell, and it's true.

I vowed I would never read anything by him again.

He varies greatly in quality and scare-factor from one story to another. I'd be interested to hear which one "got" you!

about the book, and the college professor, and the eldritch, cyclopean, non-euclidian horror from beyond time and space.

The one set in New England.

Kind of like the Stephen King story with the guy who goes crazy in New England.

I don't care for King's writing, though I acknowledge that the man himself is quite an admirable character. However, I read a number of his works in the 80s, and they all seemed to follow the same style of descent-into-madness.

Yes of course that's a generalization, before any of the King's retainers jump all over me about it. :P

he never left a way out. The triumph of unimaginable evil was always inevitable. No one was going to survive. Even in apocalypse novels like King's "The Stand" and Robert McCammon's gorgeous, lyrical "Swan Song" there was a hope. Lovecraft never allowed an out. I am surprised that he still remains so popular with people who are not complete nihilists.

McCammon is a fantastic writer! The characters in that novel still stick in my mind decades after I read it. Why this guy has never gotten the critical and popular acclaim he deserves is a mystery.

The other writer who's been classified as a "horror writer" who is much, much more is Dan Simmons. Recently he's also written some stunning science fiction as well, including the "Endymion" series.

Anyone who considers me low-brow for reading King, McCammon and Simmons should be reminded that Dickens and Twain were once dismissed as popular hacks. And believe me, Dickens and Twain did write some gosh-awful novels in addition to the ones still admired. I once read every one of their novels when bed-ridden and there was no other literature around.

Lyrical, subtle and endlessly fascinating. All of his books were ultimately about redemption. Very true to his Southern roots in that respect.

I used to work in an SF bookstore and he came in for a signing once. He autographed my then complete collection of his first editions. Lovely man, very mellow and appreciative of his fans. I can't begin to say enough about him and his remarkable talent. Even in his lesser works, his characters popped off the page with an astonishing clarity and vividness.

Either IT or The Stand, most likely.

It's sci fi YA about a natural disaster, but it's also a thinly veiled metaphor for the impact of climate change on food supplies, social order, etc. The sequel is The Dead and the Gone.

For a long time after I read it, I looked at grocery store shelves in a whole new way.

Freaky shit, man.

I was 14 or 15. Around 3 a.m., I realized I was too terrified to keep reading but too terrified to put the book down and face the shadows of my room. And then my dad started talking/moaning in his sleep and I nearly shat my bed.

Too scared to put it down, too scared to keep reading. :scared:

I don't believe in ghosts and the supernatural but Annie Wilkes scared the crap out of me.

"Annie, what did you mean when you said you gave me a pre-op shot?"

Song of Kali, Carrion Comfort and Summer of Night all scared the living daylights out of me at various points.

but I thought the novel really sucked.

Stephen King and zombies. What a great combo.

Read it years and years ago. Gave me nightmares.

Leave the light on all night and sleep in a bed that is by no windows with the door propped shut with a chair.

:scared: Bugliosi put himself into Charlie's shoes a little too much. Two sides of the same coin, one good, one evil.

Knowing there were such people on earth is scary!

I liked The Stranger Beside Me for that reason. Ted seemed so "normal."

Especially knowing how seriously people take it, and what people will do based on any weird or warped interpretation of it.

History shows exactly how scary the Bible can be. :(

I won't re-read it because of that...

... by Peter Straub.

All of Straub's books have a tendency to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and take notice:

"Ghost Story"
"If Your Could See Me Now"
"Full Circle"

That scared me good

and its younger, acerbic, Scottish cousin, Iain Banks' "The Wasp Factory."

I'm guessing "We Have Always Lived in the Castle, since it was in the title. From some of your other posts I've seen (I think it was one of yours that finally got me to get around to reading "House of Leaves," so thanks for that), I think that you would probably like "The Wasp Factory" as well.

I'll add The Wasp Factory to my list though!

She showed the chilling possibilities of small town Americana when Stephen King was still whizzing in his shorts.

http://www.amazon.com/Eyes-Killer-Robot-Puffin-Novels/dp/0141300620/

I'm sure if I read it now I'd laugh about it, but when I was younger I only got about halfway through that book and I couldn't sleep that night. Never even finished it. :P

I probably read that at least a dozen times between ages 9-12.

It was pretty damn scary for a "kid's book."

I need to get the rest of the Lewis Barnavelt series. At least 1-6, the ones after that were written by somebody else after Bellairs died. Heck, I need another copy of the first one. I've read it so many times that a few pages have fallen out.

Yeah, that creeped the hell out of me.

My wife's a school teacher and I just reread it from her shelf. It just doesn't work. I guess you have to be that right age.

"The Figure in the Shadows" scared me BAD.

Another one that scared the SNOT out of me when I was little is "Wait 'til Helen Comes."

DAMN that's some fine horror right there. :D

by Shirley Jackson...even scarier than the original movie with Julie Harris. I started reading it on a sunny Sunday afternoon. I couldn't put it down and went to bed, still reading it. My cat had a habit, if my bedroom door was closed and he was left outside, of sticking his paw under it and tugging at it, making a loud banging sound...he did this when I was almost finished reading it, about 2 am. I swear my heart almost leapt up through my throat and splattered against the ceiling, I was so frightened! Now I look back on it and laugh, cats have "funny" senses of humor sometimes.

I actually thought he was "tearing her apart"...that poor woman!

scares me

In my opinion he is one of the best writers I have read, mainly because he can really tell a story. Every character, no matter how minor, is so fully fleshed out, as well as the surroundings that you really get sucked into his world. There is a point when you are no longer reading a story but are becoming a part of it.

IT gave me a lifetime fear of clowns, I read The Stand when I had a cold, so of course I thought I was going to die, Gerald's Game freaked me out, Misery was just creepy.

I think that is why his work rarely translates well into movies (with the exception of Misery, The Shining) because you can't paint a picture with a screenplay like you can with a novel.

It doesn't translate well because most of it is mental, the images you create in your own mind that relate to how you experience things.

This is King's genius. He is able to write in a way that we are able to relate the characters no matter our backgrounds. This is rare in a writer, especially one who, on the surface, tends to be grounded in specific geographic locations and uses common themes that seem to have rather limited ways they can be interpreted. But, that's not the case. He's taken the Everyman concept and established it in a horror genre.

Jack Torrance is, again on the surface, anything but an Everyman. Who in the world has spent a winter as a caretaker of a resort? Not me. You? Anyone? Further, who here has lost their job for assaulting a student after a drunken rampage? Anyone?

But inside that character, there is a great deal with which we can relate, whether we acted out in the way he did or not. We've all felt that anger against the unfairness of the world. Most of us can relate to what we interpret for ourselves as an unfair life where we made mistakes and suffered unfair punishment relative to what we've seen happen to those around us.

And many of us, in the pits of deep sadness and doubt, have imagined many things that could be expressed as a dark force controlling our destiny through time, something we struggle against but over which we ultimately have no power.

And that is the theme of his novels in summary.

When that gets to the movie screen, it changes because what we see on the screen is not what we saw in our minds, and it all changes. It becomes more literal, and we no longer relate as well because the pictures we see do not match what we saw in our heads. His stories are simple. His characters are not, because they are us, and we are not simple. We have devils inside us or around us, and we relate to that story.

OnEdit: I mentioned Torrance (The Shining) because, while that was a good movie, it's a different story than the novel. There was a movie made more recently that followed the novel more closely, but it was forgettable.

When it ame out back in the '70s.

Was visiting my dad, and I read almost all of it in one night.

Had to keep checking for red pig eyes staring at me from the window.

I was freaked

and my brother used to tease the hell out of me because ( in our bunk beds at night ) the window was closer to the top bunk where I was, and we would be laying there...all of a sudden, "Hey, I see Jody! It's looking in our window"!

Shortly followed by me jumping OFF the bunk bed and running out of the room....

No wonder I'm so fucked up today

You Know Who I Am

http://www.amazon.com/You-Know-Who-I-Am/dp/1440417091/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227750197&sr=1-1

"An unnamed man, in an unnamed city, knows something horrendous is happening. Through the warped sliver of twilight between dreams and waking he chases a killer who may or may not exist. His circular journey will force him to reckon with both his traumatic past and his nightmarish present. In a world where identities change and merge with the logic of a dream, and the murky faces seen through rain and fog may not be human at all, there are no entrances and no exits - only an inevitable progression toward the terrifying truth."

/shameless plug :evilgrin:

:scared:

:D

I think everybody's beaten me to all the good ones.

Lots of King's stuff. Duma Key. Bag of Bones. Dreamcatcher. To name a few that aren't the most popular of King's stuff. Rose Madder had the most dramatic, powerful opening I think I've read, althought it's not strictly horror.

House of Leaves is fantastic. Reminds me of many great writers all rolled into one.

Lovecraft was already mentioned. "The Whisperers in the Dark" was scariest, IMO.

Dan Simmons is great, particularly The Terror, and Winter of Night.

Not mentioned- there's William Hope Hodgsons. Very Lovecraftian.

F. Paul Wilson's "The Keep" had some great scares, although the ending stunk.

Peter Straub's "Ghost Story" had the single scariest, unnerving bit I've ever read, although the novel itself isn't that good.

I have been scared by many books in my life, but that might have been the first book that TERRIFIED me.

Good times. :D

Equally creepy in different ways.

Reading it late at night, when everyone else was asleep.....YIKES!!! :scared: :scared: :scared: :scared: :scared:

That so exposed the dark side of human nature it really disturbed me. That one left a mark.

Kept me up late many nights in middle school.

Oh, and Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado", "The Black Cat", and "The Tell Tale Heart".

parents house by myself. It was a very old,dark, huge house, maybe 15 rooms,and i scared the shit out of myself. I was afraid to go to the bathroom, but I could not stop reading that book till I finished it.
I think I have about 4 copies of it now in various states.

Maybe it's time to read it again.


mark

It goes without saying that it's much, MUCH better than the movie.

Scariest short story: "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison.

I love his whole Otherness saga.

And Ellison's story: nice choice.

I love me some Repairman Jack! :toast:

Read it as a kid in high school, and haven't read it since, but I remember it scaring me a lot at the time.

The movie didn't do it justice.

Shitty movie made of it; the book's scarier than hell......

:scared: I think the book was scarier, but I have never re-read it.

when I was in high school, and it scared the hell out of me because it was clear that 1984 was Reagan's (and the religious right's - remember, the Moral Majority was just getting its Reagan-sponsored place on the cabinet) wet dream idea of what a country should look like.

It made me very aware of the doublespeak of the Republicans and the Christian right, of their hatred of freedoms, of their intense desire to monitor and control our private actions while letting corporations and whatnot run wild and do whatever they want.

N/T

It's been such a long time since I've read a scary book, that perhaps I've become jaded. Spook'ems just don't do anything for me any more.

Believe it or not. It must have been the perfect synchronicity of age, subject and imagination. I recall clearly putting the book down and walking close to a window on the balcony and literally being afraid to go out on the balcony for fear of being seen by the alien tripods! It only lasted for a second before I realized it wasn't real but I felt real fear.

I couldn't put it down and read it in one sitting.

the day I went into labor with my son. In the book the li'l devils name was Andrew John

I named my li'l devil Andrew Jon . That was in 1970!


but I digress-- my scariest book is A Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood

how to scare a modern, erudite audience.

it is possible, unfortunately, it's all non-fiction.

:rofl:

He's among my favorite authors.

Cujo really scared the hell out of me. And it was soooo different from the movie. Stephen has no mercy for his characters.

I don't think his books translate well into movies because he draws you in with his descriptions and then your own imagination takes over.

I know I conjured up some horrible stuff in Pet Cemetery that were nowhere near as ghastly on the screen.

Great take on vampires before they got trendy again.

yikes

All scare me because at any time in our lives we could encounter a pyschopath that would cause us harm.

the disfigured sisters creeped me out

Book kept me up nights for three semesters.

I still get chills thinking about it.

Nothing else could quite come close to that level of terror...except the traumatizing memories we'll all have of the Bush administration. :scared:

I stayed up all night and read it, because I was too afraid to go to sleep!